Chayei Sarah: What Makes For A Successful Life?

Parsha 5774/2014

Video 5 of 56

The Torah eulogizes Sarah by dividing up her age into 100 years, 20 years, and 7 years. In this video, Rabbi Fohrman delves into Rashi's famous explanation, and shows us that Sarah's integrated of experiences into her later life, we are given a model for how to best embrace life.

Hi everybody, this is Rabbi David Fohrman and welcome to Parsha Chayei Sarah.

Have you ever met an elderly person, some really advanced in years, you looked at them and you said to yourself, that’s how I want to be when I get to be that age. Have you ever met that kind of person like that and sensed that you are on the presence of an extraordinary human being? I had a grandmother like that, she died a while ago but my wife always comment about her, that’s how I want to be when I get to be her age. When you meet people like that do you ever stand back and ask yourself, what makes them so extraordinary, what is it that they are doing right which is so hard to do and once it all boils down to something, it appears in the very first verse, of this week’s Parsha.

This week’s Parsha talks about the eulogy that Abraham gave for his wife Sarah. We don’t know much about the eulogy, vayoavo Avraham lispod leSarah v’livkotah, we just know that Abraham gave one and cried for her but it’s almost as if the torah itself provides it’s eulogy for Sarah. In the very first verse of the Parsha, vayihu chayey Sarah, this verse which talks about 127 years of Sarah’s life is the basis for one of the most famous comments of Rashi and all of Sefer Bereishit. Rashi notices that the verse doesn’t say that Sarah died when she was 127 years old. It says that she was a 100 years, 20 years and 7 years and Rashi is bothered by the need to interpret the word ‘years’, between each of this, it breaks up the units. Its 127 years but there’s like three separate units, a 100, 20 and 7 and Rashi argues that the meaning of this is like when she was 100 she was like 20, when she was 20 she was like 7 and when she was 100, she was as guiltless from sins that she was taunting, when she was 20 she was as beautiful, as innocent looking as if she was 7. What’s Rashi getting at here? Is there a larger meaning here?

I heard an idea long time ago quoted by the name of Rabbi Soloveitchik and I want to share it with you. Part of being human means going through different stages in life. When you are young, when you are a child, it is a state of innocence, curiosity, exuberance and when you become a teenager, adolescence, independence is praised. Little bit later in life, different priorities are merged naturally, like to settle down and look to get married. Little bit later in life you start to raise your kids, you start wondering about your values, what exactly do life stand for, how do I want to educate my children? life comes with a lot of different stages. What makes for the extraordinary person?

Well, you can say that there are two different ways of going through the stages of life. You can almost divide people into two kinds of people. One to pass through them to go through stage A and after you go through stage A, you leave stage A behind and enter stage B. As you go from stage B to stage C, you leave stage B behind. So you go to stage C. That’s the ordinary way to go through life but there’s an extraordinary way to go through life. The way Sarah did it, take the stages with you and you build but as you go towards 20, don’t exchange that innocence for new stage in life. You keep that innocence and that exuberance, that curiosity and you build on it. As you become an adult, as you grow wise, as you cumulate life experience, you don’t leave being a child behind. You bring the innocence, the exuberance, the curiosity of childhood along with you and integrate that into your life’s experience. As you go to later stages of your life, you ask yourself, what’s the impact that I am giving the world instead of becoming obsessed with that question, you bring the innocence, the exuberance, the curiosity of childhood along with you. You bring the wisdom, the life experience, the definitions of principles that come from how do am I going to educate my kids, the questions that preoccupied me, my 32 bring that with you. As you begin to embrace the questions, of what impact I am going have on the world, my middle life crisis. I fuse it all together and as I go towards the even later stages of life, when death starts to become real, that too doesn’t feel like the only thing that preoccupies me. I don’t leave the rest behind, I bring it all with me and my experience at every stage is enriched for it, each stage in life strikes a different note, a different musical note but when I strike one note at a time, that’s ordinary, that’s kind like of playing the kind of xylophone the Fisher Price makes. When I take one note and integrate it into another, you know what we call that – we call that harmony. That is the stuff out of what symphonies are made. That’s what it needs to live an extraordinary life.

When you are 20, you still have 7 and when you are 100, you still have 7 and 20, also. Your 100 years, your 20 years, your 7 years, your all of the together, that’s the eulogy that torah gives for Sarah. And that, in the view of Rabbi Soloveitchik, is what Rashi means, within just a few words, he expresses what makes her so extraordinary.